The invention relates to a web server that employs unique identification of linked objects.
Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are well known. Web browsers are software residing on a client (e.g., a personal computer). Via the browser, the client can communicate with a web server to enable access to and viewing of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents. A web server typically includes a server (e.g., a UNIX- or Windows NT-based computer) connected to a network (e.g., the Internet, an intranet or other network), web server software configured with the host name of the server and the location of HTML objects on the servers and the HTML objects stored by that server.
In general operation, to access a web page, a user enters a request by specifying a uniform resource locator (URL) via the browser and hitting xe2x80x9cSubmitxe2x80x9d (or another function key) and the URL is sent to the web server using HTTP. The web server responds by locating the requested HTML document and returning it to the browser. The browser receives the HTML document, interprets the HTML codes, translates them into a web page, and displays the web page. In this way, web browsers enable access to the vast number of HTML documents via the World Wide Web, the Internet or intranets. HTML generally is well known. A primary purpose of HTML is to describe how to format the text (and other content) of a web page. HTML uses tags to indicate how text of a web page should be displayed and to specify the URL of objects to which a page is linked. HTML objects are commonly stored on a web server as standard text files with a HTM or HTML extension. Linking is a powerful feature of HTML. One drawback with HTML links is that links are created by coding a page with HTML tags to link it to other objects (e.g., another document or a specific location within a document). Therefore creating web pages and links requires a working knowledge of HTML and the time required to write HTML code a create a page and any desired links. Editing an HTML page or a link typically requires using HTML to edit the original web page or link. One significant problem with HTML links is that if a web page (or other object is linked to it) is moved or deleted any links to that page or object needs to be manually changed or a xe2x80x9cfile not foundxe2x80x9d message will appear when a user clicks on the link.
One limitation of web browsers and web servers is that they were designed primarily to access HTML documents. Browsers typically cannot cause a web server to retrieve and return non-HTML documents. This inhibits a user from accessing non-HTML documents, objects or databases from a web browser. Non-HTML objects, for example, may include non-HTML documents, stored views for documents in a database, identification files stored in a user directory and many other types of objects. Views provide a convenient way to index a plurality of documents. Identification files may comprise information about a system user (e.g., electronic mail address, role, profile, etc.).
A common problem with HTML linked pages is that if the name or location of a page changes, the link to it must be re-coded. Otherwise an attempt to link to that page will return an error message, such as xe2x80x9cPage Not Found.xe2x80x9d Another drawback is that if a user creates an index of pages, with a link to each page, to add a new page the user must modify the HTML code.
Other drawbacks exist.
One object of the invention is to overcome these and other drawbacks present in existing systems.
Another object of the invention is to provide a web server that can respond to requests from a web browser for either HTML or non-HTML documents and return the requested documents to the web browser.
Another object of the invention is to provide a system that enables linked documents to have a unique identifier, with the link referring to the identifier to avoid errors if a page is renamed or moved.
Another object of the invention is to provide a system that enables automatic link updating when new documents or links are created within a system.
According to one embodiment of the invention, the system comprises a novel web server for a client/server network, where the client side is equipped with a standard browser. The server comprises standard web server functionality (e.g., HTTP server), an HTML translator, a server side software (e.g., Lotus Notes server software) and a database (e.g., a Lotus Notes database). Significantly, the database does not need HTML objects. Preferably, the server receives a URL-based request from a browser via HTTP, the HTTP server and HTML translator determine the object (e.g., documents or databases) specified by the URL, retrieves that object, translates that object to HTML format and sends the HTML downloaded object to the client side browser for display.
According to another aspect of the invention, the system provides a unique identifier to documents within the system. After the system assigns a unique identifier, the system refers to the document by the unique identifier This provides several advantages, for example, link management. If a link is referred to by filename or location, and the filename or location is changed, the system will be unable to locate the object. Because the system uses a unique identifier which does not change for a given document, the links are maintained.